I had requests for maps using the default style, but without street names, in the past already. Now such a request has come up again, for a school project where pupils are expected to collect street names for their neighbourhood themselves.
For a brief time I even had a patched version of the default style onlne to offer this, but it turned out that keeping such a forked style maintained was taking some effort.
As Mapnik provides the possibility to turn of layers of a loaded style file, I now extended the renderer configuration file by an option “exclude_layers=…” to make use of this feature.
This now allows me to easily create a copy of an already supported style with some rendered featuers removed, without having to actually copy and modify the stylesheet itself.
So now there’s a “CartoCSS OSM style without street names” style entry in the “Special interest” section of the style selection dropdown, and it is going to work with future version updates of the default style easily, without any further maintenance cost (as long as layer names stay the same).